Tag Archives: Ryan Gillard

Eric Gillard, the brother of one of the Lowell Six, holds a sign in front of the courthouse. Photo by Paul Lefebvre

by Paul Lefebvre

copyright the Chronicle 8-22-2012

NEWPORT — It took a jury of nine women and three men four hours to find wind opponents known as the Lowell Six guilty of unlawful trespass, following a one-day trial here in Superior Court.

The verdict appeared to reflect a trial in which a straight law and order issue trumped a disputed property boundary.

Conflicting testimony over the dispute may have confused the jurors as about an hour or so into their deliberation, they sent a note to the judge.

They wanted to know if there could be a legal owner when a property is in dispute. And if the dispute was still current.

Trial Judge Martin Maley complimented the quality of the questions, but ruled each irrelevant.

“Do the best you can based on the evidence you heard,” he instructed them.

Disputed property boundaries were the key to the defense case: If the state could not prove that the protesters were standing on property that was in the lawful possession of Green Mountain Power (GMP), then the defendants could not be convicted of unlawful trespass.

The prosecution argued that GMP was in lawful possession of the property, and that the protesters had broken the law when they refused to leave the land that had been posted by the company.

The trial was the first to be held involving protesters against the Lowell wind project that is being constructed by GMP.

Each of the six were arrested on December 5, 2011, when they refused police orders to leave posted property on Lowell Mountain while blocking the path of heavy construction vehicles.

Although the six presented their case as a group, the jury found each guilty as individuals.

Six more protesters are scheduled to be arraigned next month for a similar confrontation on the same mountain earlier this month.

Held Wednesday of last week, August 15, the trial was surprisingly silent on the underlying and highly charged issue that caused the defendants to break the law. Before the jury entered the courtroom, Judge Maley warned he would only allow limited testimony on why the defendants were on the land. And nothing, per se, on wind itself.

The jury, he said, knew what the case was about. “It’s not a secret to them.”

So wind remained the elephant in the room: the one everyone knew was there and agreed not to see.

Surprisingly, the only one to raise it as an issue was prosecutor Sarah Baker, when she sought to challenge the intent of the defense’s star witness, surveyor Paul Hannan of Calais, formerly of Holland and at one time a Kingdom legislator who served in the House.

Placed on the stand as an expert witness by defense attorney Kristina Michelsen, Mr. Hannan was prepared to provide the rock-bottom kind of testimony the defense needed to support its case.

Mr. Hannan testified that he had 31 years of experience as a surveyor and the credentials to qualify as an expert. The rules of evidence, however, say that either side can challenge an expert’s witness. And when her turn came, Ms. Baker proceeded vigorously.

First she asked Mr. Hannan about his association with Sterling College, and learned that during the years 1990 and 1991, he was one of the faculty members who accompanied students on three-to-four-day expeditions on Lowell Mountain.

The prosecutor pressed on. Did he have any prior knowledge of Don Nelson — who allowed the students to use his property and who also is in a property dispute with GMP concerning the boundary line between his land on the mountain and the adjourning site where the utility is constructing its wind project.

No, said Mr. Hannan.

Ms. Baker may have thought she had found a chink in the defense’s armor when she abruptly asked the witness if he had any association with any anti-wind group.

Instead, the question brought a prompt objection from attorney Michelsen, along with a few hisses and murmurs from the 35 or so spectators in the gallery, a largely anti-wind crowd.

Judge Maley sustained the objection and Ms. Baker sat down, taking with her any references that the industrial wind project on Lowell Mountain had anything to do with the case.

There was a stirring in the closing moments of the trial when one of the defendants, Dr. Ronald Holland, took the stand. The doctor’s name had surfaced earlier in the trial when Deputy Sheriff Phil Brooks testified for the state.

Of the ten protesters on the mountain that day, the deputy said he only knew Dr. Holland from previous personal and professional encounters. He went on to testify that about two weeks prior to the December 5 confrontation, he received a call at home from Dr. Holland. The doctor, according to the testimony, told the deputy he was going to the mountain that day to protest and wanted the deputy to arrest him.

“I informed him I was off duty and it wasn’t going to be me,” Deputy Brooks testified, adding that he passed what he characterized an “odd request” on to the State Police, who didn’t do anything either.

That testimony was before the jury when Dr. Holland took the stand late in the day. The 67-year-old resident of Irasburg told jurors that days prior to the confrontation with police, he had gone onto the site and measured with twine the distance where he believed Mr. Nelson’s property ended.

And on the day of the confrontation, he testified he went to the limit of that measured distance.

But in a question that had nearly everyone in the courtroom leaning forward on the edge of their seats, Ms. Michelsen asked the emergency room doctor why he had climbed to the top of Lowell Mountain on December 5, 2011.

He paused and bowed his head a moment before answering that he had gone there to “protest the taking of Don Nelson’s property.”

Defendant David Rodgers, 69, of Craftsbury followed Dr. Holland to the stand and testified that he too believed he was on the Nelson property when police moved in to arrest him.

He testified that Dr. Holland had tied a block of wood to the end of a string as a means of measuring the property’s boundary. And that he was “very careful not to” trespass on the land GMP is leasing to erect its 21-turbine wind plant.

The procession to the stand might have continued had not the prosecution agreed to stipulate that the remaining four defendants had followed the doctor’s lead.

But if the defense thought a protest over property rights could overturn the confrontation that followed, the jury saw it differently. Nor did any witness refute or challenge the deputy’s testimony over what happened that day.

Deputy Brooks testified he received a call around nine that morning from GMP, informing him that protesters were on the mountain blocking heavy equipment from working on the wind project. Police arrived roughly two hours later, and observed that the group was blocking cranes and big trucks.

“They were stopped on either side of where the defendants were,” he testified.

Deputy Brooks testified that prior to December 5, GMP had shown him a map of the project and its property boundaries. And when confronting the protesters, he said he gave everyone the opportunity to step back behind the property line between GMP and the Nelson farm.

Of the ten protesters, three complied with a police order to step aside. Six refused and were placed under what sounded like a gentleman’s arrest. The deputy said he chatted cordially with the defendants and discussed everything but the project going on around them.

“I limited myself to that,” said Deputy Brooks.

The biggest problem police encountered that day, the deputy added, was finding a way to transport their prisoners off the mountain.

Police also arrested a seventh individual, Chronicle publisher Chris Braithwaite, who is challenging his arrest on grounds he was there doing his job as a reporter.

GMP’s intent to keep people off the site and the property it has under lease was deliberate and thorough, according to its project manager Charles Pughe, who also oversaw the posting.

“We cleaned out several stores,” he said, speaking of the no trespassing signs the company purchased. “We had to have so many of them.”

Mr. Pughe testified that the land was initially posted for safety and to keep hikers out of harm’s way. But he also noted that problems with people at the site began appearing sometime in October, as campers began to gather on the neighboring Nelson land.

Terms of the lease gave GMP authority to exclude or allow access to anyone the company chose, he said.

Mr. Pughe was off site the day the protesters were arrested. But under cross-examination by Ms. Michelsen, he said, he could tell from photographic evidence — including photographs taken by the arrested journalist — that the protesters were on GMP’s leased property at the time of their arrest.

He estimated the face of the turbine would be about 200 feet away from the Nelson boundary line.

From the moment he took the stand it was evident that Don Nelson was not going to be a friendly witness.

He gave mostly monosyllabic responses to the prosecutor’s questions, and when asked to read a document, he shrugged and said he didn’t have his glasses. That brought a query from the bench

“Need your glasses, Mr. Nelson?” asked Judge Maley.

“Don’t have them with me,” replied Mr. Nelson.

The prosecutor decided to try a different tack by asking the witness if he had given Dr. Holland permission to go on his property.

“My land is open. People come and go,” he replied. “I don’t invite or not invite. We don’t post it.”

When Ms. Michelsen’s turn came to ask the questions, Mr. Nelson said that Dr. Holland had come to see him about the boundary dispute, and that he had provided him with the coordinates that were in disagreement. According to his testimony, the dispute began years ago with the landowner who leased the land to GMP. At the time, the witness testified, there was a difference of roughly 420 feet.

For its final witness, the state put on the surveyor who recently bought out a surveying business in Derby Line that surveyed the Nelson property several years ago in hopes of resolving the boundary dispute.

Andrew Nadeau testified that the previous owner had surveyed the property in dispute in 2007, and that he had spent in excess of two weeks surveying it as well. But the surveyor who spent the longest time on the stand turned out to be the expert for the defense, Mr. Hannan.

Throughout his testimony, Mr. Hannan repeatedly testified there were fundamental mistakes in the 2007 survey — that affected the boundaries of lots leased by GMP.

He told jurors that in surveying the same ground, he found that markers had been inappropriately defined. He said there must be corroborating evidence to define a marker or monument that had been used in the past when the land was first surveyed. And such markers, he added, could be used to determine boundaries.

“When is a stone pile a stone pile or a monument?” he asked at one point.

Jurors already had heard from Mr. Nelson that surveying is not an exact science, and depends in part on the quality of surveys done in the past. Mr. Nelson noted that he and his neighbor had tried to settle survey discrepancies on their abutting lands through an agreement. Their boundary dispute was rekindled, however, when the agreement came unraveled.

Mr. Hannan testified that in surveying the land for the Nelsons, he found almost no markers on the ground that were left when the land was first surveyed in 1790. And he told the jurors that the monuments defined by the 2007 survey were inaccurate.

Closing arguments were short, lasting about five minutes apiece. Each attorney offered similar arguments to those they had made in their opening statements.

The verdict clearly took the defense and its supporters by surprise. After asking the judge to poll each juror for a verdict, Ms. Michelsen said she would be filing post trial motions. The court gave her ten days to submit them.

Prosecutor Baker said she would be requesting a restitution hearing, which means the state will try to convince the court to order the defendants to pay compensation to GMP.

The late hour verdict led the defendants to call off a press conference they had planned to hold at the conclusion of the trial.

In a press release Monday, Dr. Holland was quoted as saying:

“We are obviously disappointed with the verdict but respect the jury’s efforts. This is, and will continue to be, a complex case that rejects the simple and disingenuous offerings of Green Mountain Power. We will continue to educate Vermonters on the science and math of ridgeline wind-generated electricity.”

As Mr. Pughe was walking away from the courthouse, he said he hoped the verdict would make his job easier.

The remaining four defendants of the Lowell Six are: Ryan Gillard, 23, of Plainfield; Suzanna Jones, 50, of East Hardwick; Ann Morse, 48, of Craftsbury; and Eric Wallace-Senft, 46, of West Woodbury.

No matter where you stand on the issue of installing 21 commercial wind turbines atop the Lowell mountains in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, whether you bristle and grieve or feel triumphant or resigned, whether you live here, in Orleans County, or in Atlanta, Georgia, whether you have been doggedly following news of the mountain occupancy or whether you feel exhausted at the very mention of the word “issue,”— whomever you are, you might find an endangered pleasure in this new book, Stand Against the Wind by the Chronicle’s co-founder and publisher, Chris Braithwaite. Those pleasures include both a textbook example of old school, shoe leather journalism built of substantiated assertions and meticulous reporting and the smithing of that information into about 2,000 utterly gorgeous sentences. One right after the other, his narrative travels in boxcars of strong, clear prose driving each of the book’s 27 chapters, and making a collective portrait of civil disobedience committed by six individuals.

The book begins with a symbolic and actual dividing line on top of Lowell Mountain. As Braithwaite analyzes what the actual plastic tape-line divides, his litany of things divided, and the disparities presented, culminate in this lovely sentence: The bright orange tape is a line “between a place that is so high, so cussedly strewn with deadfalls and moose shit that nobody goes there except to hunt and hike, each winter for many years to enjoy the near-wilderness experience of camping in the snow; and a mountain so convenient that a guy can drive his pickup to the top just to check the oil on a multimillion dollar machine.”

This first editorial chapter (originally published in the Chronicle) invites us to “risk feeling that you are being torn in two…up where the blasting will soon begin.”

For those of us who did not accept that invitation, the Chronicle has consistently covered the issue for months, and even years.

Although the book encompasses some key events leading up to the commencement of Green Mountain Power’s project to install industrial wind towers on one of Vermont’s northernmost ridgelines, what Braithwaite calls “a wonderful sort of nowhere, ” the book takes for its subject the actions of some concerned citizens to stop it from happening. Like a club sandwich, the book is not just lettuce and cheese, the names and the dates, the he said, and she said. There are other layers interspersed, and the meat of this feast is really found in the in-depth profiles of a half dozen protestors, whom we meet one at a time, the six people most consistently involved with using “direct action.”

“Who cares?” and “Why do they care?” But more importantly: “How do they care?” — this exploration of what care-in-action looks like, of how to gracefully express distress is certainly pertinent to everyone. For even industrial wind tower proponents surely have, at one time in their life, experienced a feeling of powerlessness against a larger force usurping and/or annihilating, something they love.

Stand Against the Wind introduces us to these complicated, intelligent, thoughtful, people, who resist the paralysis of despair and flex that constitutional right we’ve all been guaranteed: the right to express our dissent.

As we learn in the fourth chapter, this expression is first modeled by Anne Morse, who explains to Braithwaite, “The point isn’t getting arrested. The point is the direct action that leads to the arrest. I think that it highlights the problem… people coming together collectively to highlight something that’s happening that’s wrong.”

Subsequent chapters feature profiles on Dr. Ron Holland, Eric Wallace-Senft, David Rodgers, Suzanna Jones, and Ryan Gillard. These interviews feel intimate, as Braithwaite allows each person to articulate the life circumstances and experiences that informed their actions on the Lowell Mountains. Their testimony is so unadulterated, it’s as if we’ve been given access to the inner thoughts, to their minds shifting, reorganizing, each building to his or her own truth. Whereas David Rodgers comes to his decision to protest thorough an increasing urgency realized in an intuitive way, confessing “It’s not something I did methodically, it was more a sense that I need to take a stand,” for Dr. Ron Holland the route to civil disobedience was incredibly logical. His focus was the policy debate. “It’s my sense if this could be put out in a quantitative kind of way — which it can, and it hasn’t been — it would be fully obvious. ”
Although a full disclosure of the links and liaisons I have to the people within this book would supplant the space needed for this review, one disclosure seems too relevant to omit: On November 2, 2009, almost three full years before the first dynamite charges were detonated, I sent an e-mail to Mr. Braithwaite (who, by dint of having published the Chronicle for the past 38 years is the dean of my de facto journalism school — meaning: I study his work intensely). In the e-mail I asked, “How do you train in objectivity? You must have an opinion on some of the things you report because: these things will affect you. The Wind Towers? If you’re feeling strongly do you suppress your opinion when writing the article but blurt it out in a once in a blue moon editorial?

Mr. Braithwaite replied tersely (but gamely) the next day with, “Proposed experiment: Read the page 1 story about Lowell wind [Wind friends, foes focus on Lowell Mt. by Chris Braithwaite November 4, 2009], then decide whether the Chronicle favors or opposes wind power in general. Then read the editorial. Did you get it right?”

I deduced, by analyzing every word, examining ratios of which perspectives got more column inches and observing that wind tower proponents got to have the last word, that probably: “Braithwaite wants big wind.” (Obviously, I won’t be graduating from my self- invented J-school at the top of my class.)

Braithwaite further explained, “the reporter’s job is to understand the interests involved and lay them out coherently, like a good sports writer advancing a world series game. You can’t do that well if you let your misguided affection for the Yankees color your assessment… so you learn not to.”

This occupational hazard is tackled again in his book. Much as the footing up to the mountaintops is moose-shit slick and tricky, so Braithwaite also admits to coming “dangerously close” to slipping over the thin partition and being a protestor. Though he accepts the cup of coffee brewed by some of the mountain occupiers, a steaming cup which he describes as a “shocking luxury” on that chilly morning, he refrains from civil disobedience, realizing he cannot report on the protest if he joins them by bending over to make a cairn of the blasted rubble or carry a handful of soil to a freshly planted sapling. And though he jokes in another chapter about the sacrifices his job demands (in particular, how a bout of extended reporting kept him from fully participating in a deer camp getaway), I feel it necessary to point out that for the readers, having a newspaper like the Chronicle at all is a shocking luxury. And that Braithwaite’s actual sacrifice to forgo his expression of civil disobedience has yielded us his newspaper’s ongoing coverage of the commercial wind project, a true boon being as we live too far beyond the radar to merit extensive coverage from other media outlets.

In the book’s introduction, Braithwaite acknowledges that he is damn glad he has postponed retirement to cover what he calls “one of the best” stories in his nearly 50-year career. However, lest we take something seemingly rock solid, enduring and readily available week after week, year after year, like the familiar silhouette of the Lowells themselves for granted, I [editorial comment approaching] believe this book, along with the coverage the Chronicle has provided, are as welcome and revitalizing as a strong cup of coffee on a cold morning in the newly blasted landscape.

Stand Against the Wind will be available soon at the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick, Green Mountain Books and Prints in Lyndonville, Woodknot Bookshop in Newport, and at the Chronicle office in Barton. The book can be ordered now at: www.createspace.com/3869681. Julia Shipley is the author of a poetry column about Vermont poems called “It could be Verse,” and she was the 2006 winner of the Ralph Nading Hill Award sponsored by Green Mountain Power, for which she received a cash prize of $1,500. She can be reached at her website: Writingonthefarm.com.